Gaza City, August 21 (RHC)-- At least 20 Palestinians have been killed and dozens of others injured as the Israeli military attacked a Gaza City school, the eleventh deadly strike against schools in the war-wracked territory in August alone.
According to Gaza’s civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal, the bodies of the victims, including children, were pulled out of the building “after an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on the second floor of the Mustafa Hafiz School building housing thousands of displaced people.”
The Israeli military claimed it targeted fighters in the school sheltering Palestinian refugees. Israel’s military has repeatedly targeted Gaza’s civic infrastructure including schools housing displaced people during the war, often claiming without evidence they are linked to Hamas, to evade international criticism.
The attack on Mustafa Hafiz School comes as the Israeli military has carried out at least 10 strikes against Gaza schools since the start of the current month, killing close to 180 Palestinians.
The attack against the Al-Tabieen School in Gaza City on August 10 was the deadliest of Israeli school attacks this month. At least 100 people, who had been performing dawn prayers, most of them women and children, were perished.
Three U.S.-made bombs, some weighing about two thousand pounds, reduced the victims’ bodies to “shredded pieces” and “burned parts,” according to various reports.
The devastating attack sparked international condemnation and outrage, and the Israeli regime, in a futile attempt to once again justify its war crimes, claimed it had targeted a Hamas command post and killed 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Later, the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor debunked the Israeli military’s claim saying that its investigations showed that there were no military gatherings or centers at the school, and it was never used for any military objectives.
It also noted that the victims listed by the Israeli military as resistance fighters were either ordinary civilians who had no ties to the resistance groups or were killed in previous attacks.
In July, a similar cluster campaign targeting school shelters across the Gaza Strip killed nearly 50 people within a week. Recent data compiled by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) indicates that half of schools used as shelters in Gaza have been directly hit in the last 10 months since the genocidal war on Gaza began.
Satellite imagery has shown that 85 percent of school buildings (477 out of 564) were directly hit (344) or damaged (133).
